This just in: Adam Habib (pictured below), a top researcher at South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), was denied entry into the United States last week after arriving in New York as part of an official delegation. According to reports, upon disembarking from his airplane he was questioned by customs officials - then deported under armed escort.
Adam Habib at the 2006 Cape Town Book Fair
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Islam’s month of Ramadaan came to a close yesterday in Cape Town - there was some debate about whether it should have been the day before, but the new moon wasn’t sighted, so the fasting continued - and, as always on the eve of Eid for the past two decades, a school parking lot in the Cape Flats suburb of Rylands came curiously to life.
Silent Night
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On the eve of South Africa’s Heritage Day, the American folk opera Porgy & Bess was the top billing at Cape Town’s Artscape Theatre, and complimentary tickets had been waved under my nose - so off we went.
The opera was a moderate success: a cast of rather unwieldy proportions (thirty players onstage during the big scenes? forty?) drove home the central point that life is fickle with gusto, and carried off a few of the numbers in gripping style. Although Sportin’ Life (Marcus Desando) didn’t quite have the pipes for “It Ain’t Necessarily So”, he certainly had the wickedness of heart, and was great fun to watch; Clara (Philisa Sibeko) was pure pathos during her reprise of “Summertime”, sung against the winds of the hurricane that had claimed her husband; and Porgy (Leonard Rowe, a last-minute replacement for Otto Maidi) was a Siberian husky of a cripple, belting out his numbers and panting so happily afterwards that you almost looked for a tail.
One of the more interesting aspects of opera in Cape Town, of course, is that it is largely performed by members of the city’s Xhosa-speaking community, which is reknowned for its vocal prowess.
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Quite against the grain of normal life Down Under, officialdom in Australia lifted a curtain on scenes from the country’s colonial past today, with appropriately chaotic results.
A Federal Court judge there ruled that an Aboriginal group known as the Noongars was entitled to ownership of some 200,000 square kilometers of Western Australia (that’s the big province in the left half, making up about a third of the entire continent), including all the land around the capital city of Perth, as well as Perth itself.
Perth, ironically, is known to South Africans as a top emigrants’ destination, untroubled as it is (like the rest of Australia) with the pesky issues around transformation and development - including land reform in favor of indigenous people - that seem to weigh in with such regularity here.
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South Africa is an arms-buying nation, a fact that rarely intrudes into the everyday quest for consumer goods here. But if you happened to be leaving the second-largest mall in the southern hemisphere with your daily shop at about 3h30 pm yesterday, you’d have been shaken by a few representative doomsday roars. See if you can spot why:
Airscape Anomaly
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